Students will develop their summarizing skills while learning about local history. They will learn to consider audience while selecting topics, conducting research and interviews, and writing historical markers for their town.

Students create a soundtrack for a novel that they have read, as they engage in such traditional reading strategies as predicting, visualizing, and questioning.

It's important to "hook" readers at a story's beginning, but it's equally important to keep them interested. In this lesson, students learn to write effective conclusions to their own stories.

Students use fractured fairy tales to practice revision and editing as separate activities when they write their own versions of fairy tales.

Students read and analyze fairy tales, identifying their common elements. They then write their own "fractured" fairy tales by changing one of the literary elements found in the original.

In this unit, students explore the meaning of family, community, and identity by reading the core text One Crazy Summer. Through the eyes of eleven-year-old Delphine, readers experience life in Oakland, California, in 1968, the height of the Black Panther movement. Delphine and her two younger sisters, Vonetta and Fern, spend a summer in Oakland visiting their estranged mother who sends them to spend their days at a camp run by the Black Panthers. Over the course of the summer, the girls learn about what it means to be part of a revolution, what the Black Panther Party was fighting for, and why the Black Panther Party was important during this time period. Through it all, they build confidence in themselves and their relationships with others as they learn to challenge and respond to social issues in the community. It is our hope that this unit, in conjunction with others in the series, will help students understand the way experiences shape our identities and beliefs, and how children can help bring about change in the community.

In reading, this unit continues to build on reading strategies and skills covered in previous units. It is assumed that students are able to quote or paraphrase accurately from the text, interpret figurative language, and summarize sections of the text. These skills should continue to be spiraled throughout the unit; however, the main focuses for this unit are determining theme and analyzing how it is developed over the course of the novel or poem, analyzing point of view and the impact it has on the way events are portrayed, and comparing characters and their responses to situations.

Isatou Ceesay observed a growing problem in her community where people increasingly disposed of unwanted plastic bags, which accumulated into ugly heaps of trash. She found a way to be the agent of change by recycling the bags and transforming her community. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Use plastic bags to develop a new product (i.e. jump rope).

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

In this lesson, students build classroom community by exploring environmental print and a teacher-created display that focuses on a favorite book. They then create and share their own presentations.

Students write an owner's manual that helps them get to know their classroom, provides them with a sense of ownership, and lets others know about their classroom.

With encouragement and ideas from his family, Papa, based on the real-life inventor Lodner Phillips, builds a working submarine that takes his family on a ride to the bottom of Lake Michigan. The resource includes a lesson plan/book card, a design challenge, and copy of a design thinking journal that provide guidance on using the book to inspire students' curiosity for design thinking. Maker Challenge: Students will use materials on hand to design a solution to a problem they see in their school or at home. The invention should meet the needs of fellow students, teachers, bus drivers, principals, siblings, friends, or even parents.

A document is included in the resources folder that lists the complete standards-alignment for this book activity.

Using published writers' texts and students' own writing, this unit explores emotions that are associated with the artful and deliberate use of commas, semicolons, colons, and exclamation points (end-stop marks of punctuation).

Students read and analyze technology reviews to establish the characteristics of the genre. They then compose their own reviews on a technology of their choice.

This lesson plan asks students to pay attention to the technologies they use. They graphically map their interactions with technology and compose narratives of their most significant interactions with technology.

Students take a fresh look at the revision process and help one another polish their written work through a peer-editing strategy that is simple, systematic, and constructive.

Students explore the genre of commercial endorsements, establishing characteristics and requirements for the genre. Each student then composes an endorsement of a product, service, company, or industry.

Students use persuasive writing and an understanding of the characteristics of letters to the editor to compose effective letters to the editor on topics of interest to them.

Students learn that you don't have to raise your voice to raise a point. Writing a persuasive letter to your principal is a great way to get your opinions heard.

The Persuasion Map is an interactive graphic organizer that enables students to map out their arguments for a persuasive essay or debate.

This lesson engages children in using writing to their families as a persuasive tool to get what they want and need.

Students use picture books as framing texts for research, freeing them from the language of encyclopedia sources and allowing them to focus their attention on the content of their papers.